This week’s movie releases

Director Neil Burger has always been one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets, digging out some surprisingly radical depths in seemingly run-of-the-mill thrillers such as The Illusionist (2006), which cast Edward Norton as a stage magician in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and Limitless (2011), which saw blocked writer Bradley Cooper popping pills to attain genius status. His latest is Divergent, a Hunger Games-style romp based on the bestselling teen sci-fi trilogy by Veronica Roth. Set in a dystopian future Chicago, where people are divided into five different factions according to their personalities, it stars Shailene Woodley (The Descendants), as Tris Prior, a young woman who discovers she is a dangerous Divergent, unable to fit into any of the tribes. Her status brings her into conflict with evil faction leader Kate Winslet, playing her first villainess, who has plans to wipe the Divergents out. A film version of the second installment, Insurgent, is already planned for release next year.

Woody Allen takes a rare acting role in someone else’s movie in comedy Fading Gigolo. Directed by and starring John Turturro, it features Woody as a broke former bookstore owner who convinces Turturro to go on the game and make them both some extra cash following a request by his sexy dermatologist (Sharon Stone). Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara, Vanessa Paradis and Liev Schreiber are among the cast.

With more innovative distribution methods up his sleeve, Spanish actor-director Paco León is looking to repeat the success of his low-budget, family-made comedy Carmina o revienta (2012) in Carmina y Amén. The blackly comic sequel finds Seville housewife Carmina, played by León’s real-life mom Carmina Barrios, coping with the sudden death of her husband and convincing her daughter (his sister María León) to help keep his demise under wraps so she can pick up a bonus check he was expecting.

Already the biggest Spanish-language ever at the US box office, Eugenio Derbez’s Instructions Not Included stars the Mexican TV star as an Acapulco playboy forced to mend his ways when an old flame leaves his baby daughter on his doorstep. Taking her to LA, initially in search of her mom, he ends up making a new life for himself there as a movie stuntman. But six years later mom returns, looking take her daughter back...

Food of love

From India, director Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox is a delicate romantic comedy set in Mumbai about a woman who seeks to surprise her husband by sending him a special lunch pail through one of the dedicated courier services that operate in the city. Instead it ends up in the hands of a lonely office worker, who, captivated by the accompanying note, composes a reply that marks the beginning of an epistolary friendship.